This disclosure generally relates to advertising systems. In particular, this disclosure relates to presenting advertisements based on receptive opportunities and a customer's activities.
The ubiquitous Internet connectivity coupled with wide deployment of wireless devices is drastically changing the advertising industry. Of the $385 billion spent globally on advertising in 2005, online and wireless spending accounted for $19 billion. Internet advertising was the fastest-growing form of advertisement, with a cumulative annual growth rate of 18.1 percent. However, Internet advertising has its limitations, and new opportunities remain to be discovered to sustain the dramatic rate of growth in new media advertising.
Existing Internet advertisements only work when a user is online and watching a computer screen. Traditional advertising, in contrast, comes in many forms. For example, signs can advertise products inside retail stores. Radio programs can advertise products when the listener engages in a wide variety of activities. Printed advertisements can appear anywhere paper is used, from newspapers, to flyers, receipts, and ticket stubs. Although Internet advertising surpasses traditional advertising in its ability to better target consumer interest, it still cannot be closely tailored to human activities.
Delivering activity-based advertisements to a customer's mobile device is a new technique that compliments the conventional advertising methods. Activity-based advertising can better target a customer's needs and dynamically adjust to a customer's activity. However, in mobile, activity-based advertising systems, it can be challenging to predict a customer's future activity correctly, and yet it is valuable to present advertising based on accurately predicted future activities. Hence, it is important to have a viable payment mechanism that is tailored to the dynamic nature of activity-based advertising and that can sufficiently incentivize the advertisers to pay for such activity-based advertising.
In the drawings, the same reference numbers identify identical or substantially similar elements or acts. The most significant digit or digits in a reference number refer to the figure number in which that element is first introduced. For example, element 102 is first introduced in and discussed in conjunction with FIG. 1.